This invention relates generally to a calendaring system and method for reminding a user of upcoming tasks and appointments and for automatically planning a user's calendar based on inputted tasks and goals of a user and cueing the user at the beginning and end of a task or appointment.
Professional and personal success depends heavily on the ability to integrate planning and execution of a routine series of steps, known as scripts, into a daily schedule. In many situations, many scripts may need to be coordinated simultaneously which may produce unexpected conflicts between the scripts. Success may also depend on the flexibility to modify previously determined scripts to accommodate changing goals and conditions and the ability to execute a planned series of events despite surprises. To respond to a surprise or deal with limited time, a person must plan and replan their schedule.
In the context of a running business, a successful product introduction to the market requires the integration of planning (selecting resources and operations), scheduling (selecting start and stop times for events), and execution of the plan. The execution of the plan may involve performing operations, monitoring for unexpected events and adjusting the plan in response to the unexpected events. There is a need to link each of these functions together to achieve success and solve dynamic planning problems caused by surprises. No products currently exist which integrate all of these functions.
Current scheduling and project management tools lack some of the functions necessary to perform dynamic planning. For example, current project management tools assume that the set of tasks to be scheduled does not change and the tool cannot automatically add or replace tasks in the schedule to replan the schedule. As another example, most scheduling systems may determine one possible solution to a scheduling problem, but will not try other possible solutions and determine the best solution based on a user's goals.
There is also little overlap between features found in calendaring systems and those found in project management tools. Most calendar systems do not provide the user with an ability to break down an appointment or a to-do item into tasks. Most project management tools do not provide any system for transforming the project goals into appointments that are scheduled. Thus, currently a user must use both a calendaring system and a project management tool in order to achieve scheduling and execution of a plan. These combined systems, however, still do not provide automatic planning. Thus, there is a need for dynamic and flexible calendar systems to remind busy people about important events (including tasks or appointments).
There is also a need to assist people with cognitive disorders to help them remember the tasks that they are supposed to be doing during a day. In particular, there is a need for a system that may be customized to a particular user and a particular user's abilities. The cognitive disorders that may be aided by such a system may be caused by a variety of injuries or diseases, including but not limited to brain injuries, Alzheimer's Dementia, stroke, tumor, electrocution, lack of oxygen, and multiple sclerosis. The number of people with cognitive disorders is very large and may be on the order of six million people in the United States. The average lifetime cost to care for a single person with a brain injury is on the order of four to nine millions dollars. The average annual cost to care for a person with Alzheimer's disease is forty-seven thousand dollars and the total money being spent for care in the United States is about one hundred billion dollars. These costs are high because a person with a cognitive disorder requires constant care to help them perform daily tasks and therefore it is desirable to provide a system which reduces these large expenditures by helping these people with cognitive disorders to plan their schedules and remind them of tasks and appointments.
The universal goal of therapy, for people with cognitive disorders, is increased independence and autonomy and achieving these goals requires planning which may be difficult for a person with a cognitive disorder. With such planning impairments, people with cognitive disorders lose much of their independence and their quality of life is reduced.
A typical person may have attention lapses in which they take the wrong exit off of a freeway because they are distracted or a telephone call may distract the person from making a dinner and the dinner burns or they may be in a hurry and forget to pack an important item for a trip. For a person with a cognitive disorder, these attention lapses occur all the time. In addition, the brain functions necessary to detect and correct such attention lapses are also damaged in a person with a cognitive disorder. These cognitive disorders affect the family of the person because the family must take care of the person.
People with cognitive disorders are typically unable to remember simple tasks or sequences of tasks, may be easily distracted from a certain task, or may be so focused on a task that they forget about other events. Thus, there is a need for a system to help people with cognitive disorders to stay focused and to complete tasks despite surprises, distractions, and unexpected events or changes to the user's schedule. Moreover, because many of the people with cognitive disorders have a dysfunctional frontal lobe of their brain that normally performs planning, these people may have difficulty planning a schedule of events for an entire day, or dynamically readjusting a schedule to handle unexpected events. For example, a user with a severe cognitive disorder may require cueing in order to get up, shower, and make breakfast. Family members of the person with the cognitive disorder may give up their free time to take on the role of a caregiver and give reminders to the person. It is therefore desirable to provide an automatic system for calendaring events and dates that may also cue the user through a series discrete steps. It is also desirable to provide a system which may plan a user's schedule based on a plurality of events, detect any conflicts in a user's schedule, and resolve any conflicts with minimum user input.
A large number of paper and electronic calendaring systems that record events and appointments are available currently. Typical electronic calendaring systems provide some ability to add daily events and may provide some reminder to a user that a particular event is about to occur. These typical calendaring systems may also permit the user to change his appointments and may indicate to the user that a conflict between events is going to occur. In the event of a conflict, a user must think about how to reschedule his calendar in light of the conflict. Thus, although these calendaring systems provide some minimal scheduling ability, none of these typical calendaring systems provide a planning capability which may predict the effects of different event/action sequences, compare those predictions to a set of specified goals and select the actions/events that maximize goal achievements.
Planning differs from typical scheduling. Scheduling involves finding a proper order for a given set of tasks, while planning involves determining and selecting those tasks that need to be scheduled based on some criteria, such as the goals, preferences or priorities of a user. A person with a malfunctioning frontal lobe of his brain cannot plan the events and they require a planning system to plan events for them. It is also desirable to provide these people with some system for reminding them of upcoming events and prompting them to complete tasks and stay focused. There are few typical systems that are designed to help people with cognitive disorders, but these systems also do not provide any planning ability because they rely on a caregiver to plan a user's schedule. These systems also have other limitations that further diminish their utility to people with cognitive disorders.
One typical calendaring system designed to be used by people with cognitive disorders comprises a laptop computer system with a simplified user interface that permits people with cognitive disorders to manage information, such as schedules, budgets, personal contacts, to-do lists and school work. This system provides pre-programmed routines (i.e., a series of steps) for specific tasks, such as paying bills or doing schoolwork. This system may provide some cueing to the user, such as a button on the screen that must be depressed, to indicate the beginning of a particular task. This system may provide some very limited method for users to modify the preprogrammed routines, but does not provide a method for inputting different choices for achieving calendar tasks. The system also does not have a planning system that permits the computer to select the optimum sequence of tasks and appointments based on a predetermined criteria, such as user goal maximization. The system also does not have any ability to reschedule events or appointments in response to surprises, distractions or unanticipated problems, to automatically reschedule the events, or to detect and resolve conflicts in the new schedule.
Another system for helping a user with a cognitive disorder comprises a desktop computer system at a central location and a pager that is worn by the user. The system is intended to cue or remind the user with the cognitive disorder when it is time to start or stop an appointment or calendar event. To operate this system, the user or a caregiver calls a dispatcher and describes their schedule for the week. The schedule of the user is entered into the computer system located at the pager operator's site. The computer system then sends messages to the user, over the pager frequency, to remind the user of appointments and events. This system does not permit the user to enter sequences of events (i.e., scripts) and does not permit the user to easily modify a task because any modification requires that the user or caregiver call the dispatcher. In addition, the computer system does not provide any system for planning, as described above, because the dispatcher is unlikely to be able to determine how to reschedule the calendar based on the missed appointment.
Therefore, there is a need for an automatic planning and cueing system and method which avoid these and other problems of known systems and methods, and it is to this end that the present invention is directed.